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"No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength."
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, chief of staff of the Prussian Army and renowned military strategist of the 19th century, never proclaimed truer words. But you’re probably more familiar with the common interpretation: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” And I’m going to extrapolate that further as “no strategy game survives contact with the player.”
Because as I play Czech-game-studio 1C Company’s Men of War: Assault Squad (a World War 2-era, real-time strategy title available for PC), I’m reminded of developer Relic’s own series in the same genre niche, Company of Heroes. The many war-ravaged grunts I’ve directed through artillery-cratered battlefields in the latter, then, unavoidably color the former.
And that insight has highlighted three ways in which Men of War executes Moltke’s battle thesis more interestingly and engagingly than Company of Heroes.
Men of War has an incredible level of detail
I don’t necessarily mean fancy graphics (but I could if I wanted). Men of War provides a level of micromanagement that I didn’t think possible in a RTS. You can order infantry to run, walk, crouch, and lay prone. You can make them crawl through a field where no cover exists to increase their chance of survival. You can direct them to enter dynamically destructible buildings and even select out of which windows they should point their weapons.
Every single unit in the game holds an inventory of items (down to individual soldiers within squads). You can even loot the bodies of your fallen foes!
That’s sometimes a solid tactic, especially during a long battle. Soldiers, jeeps, howitzers, tanks, and so on have limited ammunition. They’ll run out. You’ll have to call in a supply truck or — if you can’t wait — dig through the pockets of your slain adversaries.
Such attention extends to tanks as well. You can separately target the tracks, hull, and main cannon. Hit enemy armor with the right tools, and you can disable those specific parts. The crews of broken-down Tigers and Shermans will exit their vehicles and continue the fight on foot. And that does mean that you can then assume command of those ruined husks should you repair them (though, I still haven’t quite figured that out…).
Men of War is primarily about tactics
Relic increasingly minimized the role of static base buildings in its strategy games. 2004’s Dawn of War asked players to construct a center of operations in the same vein as Blizzard’s Warcraft and Starcraft games from the ‘90s. 2006’s Company of Heroes pared this down with fewer options and prebuilt defenses. 2009’s Dawn of War 2 removed those entirely for the single-player campaign while converging all facilities’ functionality into a single structure in multiplayer.
But Men of War seems to have never even entertained the idea.
You don’t “build” additional warriors; you call in reinforcements who enter the field after a timer counts down. You don’t have research labs to unlock sets of unit tiers; your unseen commanding officer grants you access to additional firepower after you've successfully advanced the front lines by securing strategic locations on the map. In other words, “teching” in Men or War means playing the main game, not a SimCity sideshow.
This sort of design flies in the face of conventional RTS wisdom. Men of War is not about build orders and timing or managing a resource economy side by side with a standing army. In this way, Men of War is more successful in putting focus on skirmishes in the battlefield than Company of Heroes.
Men of War is about pushing forward
This game moves at a slower pace. Like Company of Heroes, your primary goal is capturing strategic locations around the map to gather supplies, thus fueling your war machine. Unlike Relic's offering, 1C Company simplifies the economy portion by utilizing a single resource, manpower, which slowly increases on its own. A big jump in manpower comes only from securing points; therefore, Men of War again encourages players to flex their tactical minds to win.
Company of Heroes matches almost always seem to devolve into a dance of whack-a-mole. You spend a lot of time digging in your soldiers and setting up lanes of fire only to watch in disbelief as a rogue rifleman squad slips through and starts seizing manpower, munition, and fuel points.
But losing a rear position in Men of War isn’t necessarily a game-changing event precisely because of the aforementioned economic design. Recapturing the location comes down to your tactical decisions; players need not contend with quickly dwindling reserves in the face of an enemy’s snowballing resources.
Many often misunderstand Moltke’s theory of war as suggesting that planning for battle is of little consequence. To the contrary, the chief of staff meant to convey that such military action is dependent on initial preparation. The second part of his theorem states, “Strategy is a system of expedients,” which only reinforces that view. Strategy, then, is the means to an end that adapts to changing circumstances in the field.
Men of War dutifully embraces these axioms of armed conflict. The game’s emphasis on combat over economy puts players in the role of tactician with the utmost focus placed on units; the extreme level of micromanagement affords a nearly complete abandonment of macromanagement.
Men of War more successfully connects players to the battlefield by building on the innovations from Company of Heroes, and as a result, 1C Company's premiere strategy title feels like a logical step forward.
